What We're Reading

A ghostly quasiparticle rooted in a century-old Italian mystery could unlock quantum computing’s potential—if only it could be pinned down.

For atmospheric scientists, snowflake morphology helps determine how the flakes descend through the turbulent atmosphere. Now, using a custom-made snowflake-tracking apparatus installed at a ski resort, Tim Garrett, Eric Pardyjak, and Dhiraj Singh at the University of Utah have amassed a unique data set of the shapes, masses, and accelerations of a half-million flakes. Their analysis hints at an unexpected simplicity in the physics that underlies the motion of solid precipitation.

A fundamental trade-off between the resolution of a clock and its accuracy could have important implications for quantum computers, which must measure short timescales accurately.

When, why and how did neurons first evolve? Scientists are piecing together the ancient story.

An upgrade to LIGO, which comes from exploiting the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, makes it easier to spot spacetime ripples that arise from some of the cosmos’s most violent events.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is aweing scientists and the public alike with its spectacular images of distant galaxies and its discoveries of dozens of new black holes. Yet JWST is also rewriting scientists’ understanding of objects on a slightly smaller, more relatable scale: how planets form from swirls of gas and dust around young stars.

Cells of different size classes all have a similar total mass, such that small, numerous cells such as red blood cells contribute the same amount to the body’s total mass as the largest cells, as reported by researchers in the September 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Until recently, gravitational waves could have been a figment of Einstein’s imagination. Before they were detected, these ripples in spacetime existed only in the physicist’s general theory of relativity, as far as scientists knew. Now, researchers have not one but two ways to detect the waves. And they’re on the hunt for more.

The current-carrying ability of so-called strange metals defies the known rules of electricity. Now Aavishkar Patel of the Flatiron Institute and his colleagues have an explanation for why.

What the hairiest problem in math can teach us about wind, antennas and nuclear fusion.